A network element such as a switch typically transmits packets to the network, in accordance with some scheduling policy. Methods for scheduling the transmission of outgoing packets are known in the art. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,023,866, whose disclosure is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method for fair queue servicing at a queueing point in a multi-service class packet switched network. Incoming packets are received in buffers and outgoing packets are scheduled by a weighted fair queue scheduler. Real-time information of buffer usage along with the minimum bandwidth requirement is used to dynamically modify the weights of the weighted fair queue scheduler.
A paper titled “Approximating Age-Based Arbitration in On-Chip Networks,” Proceedings of the 19th international conference on parallel architectures and compilation techniques, Sep. 11-15, 2010, Vienna, Austria, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes an on-chip network of emerging many-core CMPs that enables the sharing of numerous on-chip components. The network provides Equality of Service (EoS) by leveraging distance, or hop count, to approximate the age of packets in the network. Probabilistic arbitration is combined with distance-based weights to achieve EoS.
A converged network typically delivers traffic of different types that may require different delivery policies, such as avoiding packet loss or minimal latency. The Enhanced Transmission Selection (ETS) standard, which describes allocating bandwidth among multiple traffic classes, is specified, for example, in “802.1Qaz-2011—IEEE Standard for Local and metropolitan area networks—Media Access Control (MAC) Bridges and Virtual Bridged Local Area Networks—Amendment 18: Enhanced Transmission Selection for Bandwidth Sharing Between Traffic Classes,” which is incorporated herein by reference.